Saturday, November 22, 2014

Amnesty, Political and Spiritual

November 22, 2014

Just the other day, our president by executive order granted amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants, otherwise known as "undocumented." He's threatened to do it for months; I guess he feels he has little to lose, since he cannot run again. I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, our perennially porous southern border has been allowing people in for years, and often those who come are willing to do work and take jobs no one else is willing to do. A friend who used to come to our youth group wrote a  book a couple years ago called "Farm Hands," about migrant workers in his area. He decided to shadow various migrant workers, attempting the same jobs they were doing day in and day out. Turns out, the large vegetable farmers in his area advertise in the local papers for laborers, and get no responses except from the migrant workers. On rare occasion, a US citizen will show up, but they don't even last a day. It's backbreaking, grueling work, and only the migrants seem willing to do it, even at more than minimum wage. They were at first reluctant to talk with my friend, wary lest they be reported and deported. Over the course of a summer, he did all sorts of work, reporting that at the end of a day he was so tired and sore that he couldn't even pick up his two year old daughter.

That's one side of the story. The other is the long wait and red tape people endure to come here legally. For them, illegals are cutting in line, reaping social benefits, taxing the system while they do their best to jump through the hoops to citizenship. To listen to all the buzz that floats around this issue, loosening our immigration policy is either the most compassionate thing to do, legitimizing adults and children who have been contributing to our society for years, or the most foolhardy and unfair approach we can take, threatening to overwhelm the system with people ready and eager to live at the expense of the rest of us.

Personally, I've listened to the arguments, and tend to come down on the side of doing things according to established law, and I am concerned with our president's penchant for unilateral executive action that bypasses Congress. Nevertheless, that word "amnesty" intrigues me, and I wonder if I am not like the laborers in Jesus' parable who  were bitter towards the latecomers who received the same wages as they who had worked all day. At the least, I am grateful for the amnesty God gave me when I didn't deserve it, inviting me into his kingdom and family when I was not only an alien, but an enemy, giving me all the rights and privileges of citizenship to boot. There was no way I could earn that citizenship, but God deliberately made the borders porous, so I could come in, and he treated me as a native-born. I'm sure there are Christians who are essentially freeloading off Jesus' generosity, but I'm not responsible for them. It is mine to take what God has given me and do the best I can with it for his glory. I am grateful to be able to do just that.

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